Title: Chief Innovation Officer
Responsibilities:I manage the innovation team, software teams, IT, the maintenance side of Azure, and building projects. I also work to develop new businesses like Missy J’s (our carob treats) and Azure Hearthstone (our bakery).
I grew up here on the farm, and I started working at Azure about a year after Azure began! My mother Anita, Azure CEO David Stelzer’s oldest sister, has been Azure’s main buyer for about 30 years. So, Azure has been a part of my life since I was about 9 years old.
At first, my uncle, David, had me help him by grinding flour and typing product labels. Back then, we didn’t have printers, so every product label had to be individually typed. I kept helping however I could throughout my years in school. At the beginning of Azure, we would work for 2–3 days to pack up orders and load a truck — we were only sending out about one truck a week back then! So we might work hard for three days to get a truck out, and then I’d go back to my schooling. I did this for a few years, until I began working full time at around age 16. I had various jobs — mostly pulling orders and repackaging. There were about 12-15 of us young kids who worked in the warehouse, and we discovered we could be much more efficient at pulling orders on Rollerblades, whizzing through the warehouse to collect products for an order. Azure became known for our Rollerblading crew! It was a lot of fun. This was where my love for efficiency began — competing to see how fast we could pull orders!
In 2004, Anne Marie and I were married, and we now have 7 children, from ages 2 to 19. We have one son, Galahad, and six daughters. Our girls, from oldest to youngest, are Brendolyn (who you might recognize from Azure Hearthstone, our bakery), Xavierra, Avalon, Teah, Adaline, and Elsie. We are so blessed to raise and homeschool our children on Azure Farm. Hard work, nature, and real-life work experiences are the best teachers!
One way we worked together was in building Azure’s carob business, circa 2017. Our family did everything in the carob room….mixing batches, making carob chips, packaging them, and more. Our children learned so many valuable skills, including how to work together to achieve big goals.
Our family prioritizes experiences over objects, and we are always looking for the next adventure together. This means we do lots of traveling around the US and sometimes around the world—we’ve been to Indonesia, Australia, Italy, Switzerland, and our kids planned a surprise 20th-anniversary trip for Anne Marie and me to Morocco. They put us on a plane with tickets sealed in envelopes, so we really had no idea where we were headed! This summer, we have plans to go to the UK. Experiencing other cultures has given our family a new appreciation for the blessings we share in the USA. But also a new worldview that nearly every culture has wonderful people that desire goodness and the same healthy and abundant living as we do, no matter how the media tries to convince us to the contrary.
In my work at Azure, one thing I’m particularly passionate about, in addition to efficiency, is our set of core values. That’s where my heart is. I’ve enjoyed walking alongside David, developing and supporting the mission of health and abundance. Almost no company, that has grown to Azure’s size, has made it without sacrificing its integrity. We have seen this happen over and over with companies we work with; they get bought out, lose the family vision, and cheapen their products. My commitment to our customers is to keep strengthening our standards to higher levels with each passing year, with the greater vision of impacting the quality of healthy goods our nation demands of its farmers and producers.
So what does the future hold for me and my family at Azure? Well, I’m thankful we don’t know… But if I could make a wish list, it would be for my family to meet yours… And your family to be able to connect with and share healthy living ideas with the like-minded Azure friends down the road or across the country. To help facilitate a national movement of healthy and abundant communities that are strong, because shared values are focused on, rather than differences.
My family and I wish God’s richest blessings on all of you. May your efforts to support healthy and abundant living be returned to you manyfold for generations!